re than forty-five minutes at the most and the words
came slowly from his lips, but when he had done my head was spinning
from more visions of bold men and large deeds than it had held since
the Christmas night when I reeled off to bed after bolting a full half
of the "Boy's Froissart."

And after that old man had sauntered away in the hot-white Arizona
sunshine I thought of other grizzled chroniclers to whom I had
listened in other parts of the West. Some of their tales came back to
me, straightforward simple stories of the days before the farmers,
barbed-wire fences, and branch railroad lines; and I marveled at the
richness of a lore whose plain unvarnished narratives of fact stand
out with values exceeding those of most adventure fiction, more vivid
and colorful than the anecdotes of the Middle Ages which the French
chronicler set down for all the world to read.

Every State between the Mississippi and the Pacific has its own
stories of deeds that took place during an era when even the
lawbreakers attained a certain harsh nobility, and when plain men must
prove themselves heroic if they would survive. The names of many
heroes in these tales have become like household words all over the
United States, and what they did in many places is printed on the maps
of school geographies; but there is a vanished legion of those
old-timers who are remembered only in the immediate neighborhoods
where they lived swiftly and died hard. Emigrant and prospector,
pioneer and Indian chief, cow-boy and cattle-thief, sheriff,
stage-robber, and pony express rider--only the old men can tell their
stories now.

All of those men, whether they be famous or forgotten, owned a common
virtue which still survives among the people who came after them.
That pioneer spirit which makes the average American eager to try what
no one else has done is the common motive in the tales of their
exploits. It stands out strongly in this story which tells how Death
Valley got its name.

One evening early in November, 1849, a party of emigrants was encamped
near Mountain Meadows down in southern Utah close to the Nevada line.
It was a glorious night of the intermountain autumn; the stars burned
large and yellow overhead. In their faint radiance the white tops of
more than one hundred prairie-schooners gleamed at the base of the
hillside which rose into the west. Here and there one of the canvas
covers glowed incandescent from a candlelight within, where som